After melting soap fans’ hearts as Bradley in EastEnders, Charlie Clements is now playing a rather more formidable ginger from history.

The actor was transformed into chop-happy Tudor monarch Henry VIII for an excellent new docu-drama beginning tonight, Henry VIII And His Six Wives.

However, he is also eyeing a role in HBO juggernaut Game Of Thrones – if he can manage to infiltrate the very ‘well-established’ show as a new star.

‘I hope Game Of Thrones doesn’t end soon,’ Charlie told Metro.co.uk. ‘The longer it goes on, the more likely I am to get in there!’

Lucy Telleck, who plays Jane Seymour, and Charlie during a scene from episode three (Picture: C5)

But it sounds like the 28-year-old can retire now because playing the infamous and pretty dashing King Henry VIII is pretty much his dream role.

Charlie told us: ‘It’s just such an epic character. It’s one person I’ve always wanted to play. I was ecstatic about it.

‘The whole Tudor period was so crazy, you can’t get your head around it that is actually happened. It’s otherworldly. You can relate to it but at the same time you can’t. I think everyone’s sort of intrigued by that.’

Despite his three-year stint in EastEnders, Charlie says he misses playing King Henry – a role famously portrayed by Jonathan Rhys Meyers in drama The Tudors – much more than ‘soft-centered’ Bradley Branning.

Charlie as Bradley Branning when he joined EastEnders in 2006 (Picture: BBC)

But in a show which spans the entire history of Henry’s relationships, Charlie admitted portraying an older, less stable Henry was ‘a challenge’.

‘It was different,’ he said. ‘You do the best you can with the information you’ve got about the person. And then you bring yourself to it.

‘We were lucky enough to shoot it in situ. We were in Tudor houses, in North Wales at a Tudor castle, and for another part of it we a were at Hoghton Tower in Preston which as built in the mid 1500s. There was so much history already there, it makes our job a lot easier.’

The six-part programme examines Henry’s tumultuous love affairs from the point of view of his six spouses – from his first, Catherine of Aragon, to his last, Catherine Parr.

Just don’t ask Charlie which wife was his favourite wife because, like Henry, he loved them all.

‘They all had their merits. I could get in real trouble with the queens here! I’d have to sit on the fence and say I’d take qualities from all of them,’ he said.

This show is Charlie’s first ever docu-drama, but the thespian – who’s been bingeing on The Night Manager, The People Vs OJ Simpson and (very belatedly) Breaking Bad – is looking to go ‘full drama’ and land a role in a serial.

One thing’s certain – he has no plans to partake in the glut of reality shows still dominating our screens, like many soap actors end up doing, because he doesn’t ‘fit into that realm’.

He said: ‘People will watch what they want to watch. If you put a drama on at the same time you put a reality show on then you’re giving people the choice. I guess you kind of have to give people that option. And let’s be honest, reality TV is a lot cheaper to make.

Charlie on Loose Women earlier this week (Picture: ITV)

‘I do think it’s changing,’ he added. ‘There seem to be more dramas coming on now and I think people are definitely becoming more interested in things like The Night Manager, and Luther.

‘There definitely seems to be more of an appetite now. Five or so years ago everything was reality TV but it’s changing again.’

When we asked Charlie if he would ever do a sitcom, he said he’d consider it if he could ‘bring something’ – but he clearly won’t be showing up in any old half-baked show, only the right ones for him.

‘As long as you’ve got a good script and a good story and you can bring a truth to it then that’s all good, and that’s effectively all I want to do really,’ he concluded.